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Source: Wikipedia A Russian chemist, Dimitri Mendeleev, invented the first periodic table of elements. Prior to that, scientists had identified a few elements but the scientific world lacked a consistent framework to organize these elements. Dimitri built upon existing work of these scientists and invented the first periodic table based on a set of design […]

Most people suck at presenting to big groups. It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs. So I thought I’d write a piece on how not to suck when you give a presentation. 1. Show some […]

In seeking to better understand customer jobs-to-be-done, I found myself a bit underarmed. Meaning, I didn’t really have a way to do this. The value of jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking has only emerged recently. It’s still nascent, and there aren’t ready guideposts to follow. However, Tony Ulwick has been at it over two decades. Indeed, his […]

The OpenStack train keeps rolling, picking up steam. Today’s Havana release is a remarkable achievement for the Foundation which only recently had its first birthday. Some stats from the Havana release, launching today: More Developers: Havana has code contributions from 910 developers, up 60+% from Grizzly, which was itself up 56% from Folsom before it! […]

If you’re selling to the enterprise, or even just anywhere in B2B, most start-ups in the first 12-18 months end up in a Conundrum. The good news is if you get anywhere at all in SaaS in the early days, you’ll have a handful of customers. Which is great. In fact, it’s amazing. Getting a […]

According to IDC’s latest report storage capacity shipped grew 21.5 percent, while total disk storage sales fell 5 percent. Makes sense. Volumes of data continue to explode. And you have to backup that data to ensure you can quickly restore it, if needed. But budget is tight. So what are the options? Many IT professionals are […]

I recently had the opportunity to spend a week in Las Vegas attending the HR Technology Conference and SuccessFactors SuccessConnect and during that time had lots of in-depth discussions with analysts, customers and fellow consultants. One of the SAP/SuccessFactors products I got asked the most about was Employee Central, which is the SuccessFactors Core HRMS offering. Here are […]

I’ve been involved with technology product design in one form or another for nearly 25 years and seen one mistake consistently repeated. The single biggest mistake most product teams make is building technology for what they believe the user would want rather than what the actual end-user needs. From the experience in my earliest days […]

I attended the PDX Cloud meeting to present, but more to ask a question. Here’s how I posed that question (slide deck at the bottom of this blog entry). I frame the scenario of the distributed development world of cloud computing, dive into the vertical world of enterprise dev and then throw down the big […]

There are two SaaS-related events I’m speaking at next week that I’m very excited about. The first up is DEMO. I’m first an Enterprise Judge on the start-up demos — and then doing an amazing panel with the CIOs of Dish, Workday and BDP International on how start-ups can actually sell to the CIO. We […]

Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes […]

On Sunday, I weighed in on the Twitter board controversy: My argument then was that there is a dangerous tendency on the part of Silicon Valley’s power players to think that those who have achieved less than they (read: everyone) don’t have the right to criticize them. Then I read an editorial by Pando Daily […]

Tim O’Reilly, the founder of the O’Reilly media empire, published a great longform essay recently titled, “How I Failed“. It’s a phenomenal read which covers a wide variety of topics, including how O’Reilly sold GNN to AOL for $15 million in stock, sold that stock as soon as the lockup expired for $30 million, and […]

Look, if you had, one shot Or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted In one moment Would you capture it, or just let it slip? [Eminem, Lose Yourself] I’ve often said that to run a startup you almost have to abstract yourself from the daily stresses and grind just to exist. You almost […]